Elian Gonzalez, the most famous castaway since Robinson Crusoe, arrived back in Havana with his father early today at the end of a seven-month odyssey which forced the US and Cuba to pay more attention to each other than they had done for decades.

Cuban castaway Elian Gonzalez began his journey home to Cuba on Wednesday after the US Supreme Court ended a custody war that came to symbolise four decades of bitterness between Cuban exiles and the communist country they fled.

The US Congress yesterday agreed to lift the food embargo on Cuba in a decision acknowledging that the 40-year blockade had done nothing to weaken Fidel Castro, and that sanctions in general have failed as a foreign policy tool.

Who is Elian Gonzalez? Six-year-old Elian Gonzalez is America's most famous refugee. He arrived in the US clinging to an inner-tube, after his mother and 10 other Cubans drowned when the boat they fled Cuba in foundered off the coast of Florida last November. Elian's great uncle, based in Miami, gained temporary custody, but the US government ruled the boy must return to his father in Cuba. Elian has been returned to his father, now in America.